Frankly I find this lack of accountability utterly repulsive. Anything this leadership touches is poison to me
> Through a mechanism called acceptance by silence or inaction, 23andMe stipulated that customers must explicitly tell the company they disagree with the new terms within 30 days of being notified of the changes or they will be locked into the terms automatically.
> After the attack, hackers published around 1 million data points about users with Ashkenazi Jewish heritage and information about more than 300,000 users with Chinese heritage.
https://www.axios.com/2023/12/07/23andme-terms-of-service-up...
https://freakonomics.com/podcast/why-is-23andme-going-under-...
Disclaimer: 23andMe customer and genomesdao holder.
We quit. You didn't give us a real offer, so we're out. We still believe in the company, but you have too much control, so we're leaving to avoid a fight. We did our best, but it's time to go.
I hope someone is writing a book on _Corporate Governance in Silicon Valley_, and include stories from, say, 23andMe, OpenAI, WeWork, Uber, and tons more. I'd pay $$ to read 'em all in one place.
/sarc
You can make a lot of money just by betting on companies where the CEO (or the CEO's office) takes listening to customers'(who are rooting for them!) emails seriously, and shorting those that do not.
But recent news suggests that police are seeking access to these newborn blood samples in criminal investigations. Such use of this trove of genetic material — to hunt for evidence that could implicate a child’s relative in a crime — endangers public trust in this vital health program and threatens all Americans’ right to genetic privacy.”
All of our new babies had heel stick blood drawn, won’t the government be the eventual competitor of 23 and me (since Americans don’t care too much about privacy).
https://www.aclu.org/news/privacy-technology/police-are-usin...
The board of directors of 23andMe just resigned in protest. The CEO, Anne Wojcicki (who's sister Susan died of lung cancer last month, and was the former CEO of YouTube) had tried to low ball take the company private at only $0.40 a share -- a more than 96% drop from its deSPAC price.
For reference, right now the market cap of 23andMe is $172 million, its closest competitor Ancestry.com was bought out by the Blackstone group for $4.7 billion, and cumulative sales of KeyTruda - an anti-cancer drug in the same family as the one being developed by 23andMe had cumulative sales of $25 billion by 2023.
Feels like the main thing holding this company back is the CEO and lack of corporate governance (due to majority shareholder control resting in the hands of one person)